In the world of NoSQL

Googling about couchdb and size limits results in everyone saying that it’s virtually unlimited. This might be true about couchdb, but not about ext3. I recently hit the ”max filesize limit” of 2 TB in a couchdb database (luckily just for an internal system). The result was that couchdb crashed(with the following error) every time the 2 TB database was accessed in any way.

For me this just meant moving the database from a Ext3 partition on the server to a larger XFS partition instead. If I would have thought about this up front I would have chosed Ext4 instead of Ext3, which has a limit (depending on how you configure it) of 16 TB. XFS on the other hand excels with a sizelimit of 8 ExaByte (that’s 1 million terabytes for you that wonders).

Update: The database is still going strong, with 23.5 million documents in it, and currently using 15.4 TB (mostly by attachments)